By Dylan Reubenking
dylan@yelmonline.com
Editor’s note: This year, Yelm will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the city’s official incorporation, which took place on Dec. 8, 1924. Every month, the Nisqually Valley News will present an aspect of the city’s history. Yelm’s history before its incorporation in 1924 will serve as July’s topic.
The City of Yelm turns 100 years old on Dec. 8, 1924, and has already begun its centennial celebration with more festivities to come this winter. Yelm’s history dates back, however, about 70 years prior to its incorporation.
The Yelm prairie was already inhabited by the Nisqually Tribe and Hudson’s Bay Company sheep farmers before the first permanent non-indigenous settlers arrived in 1853 to join the company.
Yelm’s story cannot be told without James Longmire, who is widely regarded as the town’s first citizen. In March 1853, he sold his farm in Indiana and took a seven-month trip, first by steamboat and then by wagon train, from the Hoosier State to the Puget Sound region with his wife, Virinda, and their four children, Elcaine, David, Tillatha and John.
Their party first consisted of 53 wagons and included nearly 150 people at times. The trek marked the first successful wagon-train crossing of the Naches Pass in the Cascade Range before the travelers arrived in the Yelm prairie in October.
In Longmire’s written narrative, recorded in the book “Yelm Pioneers and Followers: 1850-1950” by Dean Hooper and Roberta B. Longmire, he described the beauty of the prairie and nearby Mount Rainier.
“Leaving my family in camp, I crossed the Nisqually River and went to Yelm Prairie, a beautiful spot, I thought. It lay before me covered with tall, waving grass, a pretty stream bordered with shrubs and tall trees flowing through,” he wrote. “And, the majestic mountain which the Indians almost worshiped and to which they gave the name, standing guard over all in its snowy coat. It was a scene for the artist’s brush, the most beautiful I had ever seen, and good enough for me.”
In the early days of settlers moving to the Yelm prairie, the Nisqually Tribe inhabitants were friendly and helpful to the white newcomers. The Medicine Creek Treaty and the Puget Sound Treaty War that it sparked were two of the most formative events in the region’s history. The war, which lasted from 1855 to 1856, was an armed conflict between tribes involved in the Medicine Creek Treaty, including the Nisqually, and the U.S. Army and Washington territorial volunteers. The war and Yelm’s involvement within it is detailed in the Nisqually Valley News’ fifth volume of its centennial series. Emigrants arrived to the prairie in large numbers at this time and especially after the war ended.
The first school in the Yelm area was a private school in the Longmire log cabin, formerly McLain Chamber’s cabin, in the 1860s, according to “Yelm Pioneers and Followers.” Yelm’s community church also held its services in a log cabin schoolhouse during this time, but Yelm’s first church, Eureka Church, was not officially dedicated for another nearly 30 years.
The year 1873 was significant in early Yelm’s history. The Northern Pacific Railroad came to Yelm, although it only stopped on a white flag signal, and there was only a platform. Passengers had to flag the train by day and then light a newspaper on fire and flourish it at night, but trains often ignored the signal to stop. Yelm’s first store was built at the intersection of the railroad and the wagon trail by a pair identified only as Metcalf and Treat.
Streets and blocks were established at the turn of the 20th century, bringing more homes and settlers to the Yelm prairie. There was a surplus of space upon which to build as the prairie was described by historians as treeless. Fires swept the land on a regular basis, and trees were not planted until the mid-20th century. Crops of choice were berries, particularly raspberries, strawberries and loganberries.
Yelm was home to 50 residents in 1908, but the establishment of the McKenna Lumber Company and the Yelm Irrigation Project brought in more settlers. The Yelm Irrigation Project was completed on June 29, 1916, and was one of the first such districts in western Washington. Yelm residents and visitors gathered to celebrate the formal opening of the irrigation project, which represented an investment of $100,000 to dig a ditch that watered 6,000 acres. A new high school was erected in 1920 as the demand for education in the area grew larger.
A series of fires in 1908, 1913 and 1924 ravaged Yelm’s business district due to the lack of a water system and fire department in the town. The Yelm Women’s Civic Club proposed incorporation, particularly after the third major fire in 1924. Incorporation allowed Yelm to rebuild its business district and continue to expand on the growth that stemmed from the past 70 years of settlers making slow progress in the prairie.
